Part of the Silence

by Debbie Howells

  “Chasing happiness,” Charley called it. “It’s already here, Casey. . . . You just have to take what’s waiting for you.”

  Charley’s happiness wasn’t butterflies and summer days and the little pink iced cakes my mother used to make that I detested. It was about pushing limits; skipping class; and catching a bus out of town, leaping off in the middle of nowhere, running faster, harder, longer, until our legs gave way and we fell on the grass, our hearts bursting.

  It slowly grew into a restless need, into always wanting more. Illicit smoking and flirting with Davey Watts, who was older and drove a little red sports car; the drinks she’d take from her parents’ fridge, which we’d consume in the park, under a tree. Cold beer, wine, vodka.

  I realized I was trusting her. And then the fear was back, choking out the light, all the more debilitating after its absence. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t run the risk of her letting me down, the way everyone else had. I reminded myself I wasn’t like her as the darkness closed in around me.

  I avoided her at school, pretending not to hear when she called out to me. Until one day, she followed me outside and grabbed my arm.

  “What the fuck is it with you?” Her eyes glinted dangerously at me. “I thought we were supposed to be friends. You’re a fucked-up, selfish bitch, Casey. Don’t mess with me.”

  “I’m sorry.” I mumbled it, wanting to explain about how the darkness had come back, how it was like swimming through treacle just to get through each day. How conversations like this were too loud, too intense, making my head hurt. “I can’t help it. Something happens.... I just have to be on my own.”

  “Are we friends or not?” she demanded. “If not, I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Yes,” I said suddenly, meaning it, not wanting to lose her, feeling the darkness lighten a shade.

  She forgave me, and we got over it—that time, at least. She hadn’t written me off. Not yet.

  * * *

  “Have you ever done it with a boy?” she asked me. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and we’d bunked off last lesson to go to the park, where we’d rolled down our socks and hitched up our skirts under the sun’s itchy heat.

  “No.” My heart in my mouth, telling myself it wasn’t a lie. The only way I could deal with what Anthony had done to me was to shut it off. For good.

  “I have.” She fell back on the grass. “Twice.” Then, when I still said nothing, she added, “Aren’t you going to ask me what it’s like?”

  “So?” I fell back next to her, trying to ignore the churning in my stomach, both of us gazing at the sky.

  “It’s okay. Don’t know what the fuss is about. The second time was better.”

  “Who?” I was consumed with curiosity. “Oh no, Charley. Please don’t tell me it was—”

  “Yes!” She giggled. “Davey Watts! In his car! I’m such a whore!”

  Suddenly, Anthony was in my head. Summoning all my strength, I forcibly pushed him out; then I found myself giggling. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done that. Suddenly, I couldn’t stop, and the laughter ripped out of me. Charley joined in, as if it was the funniest thing in the world. It was only after we stopped that I noticed the tears streaming down my cheeks.

  Together, we were invincible. In a shifting, transitory world I didn’t trust, Charley was my only constant. I had no doubts that we’d do everything we’d set our hearts on, and much more. We were already saving money to travel. Traveling was the first part of the plan. Paris, Monaco, Rome, Athens, Charley said. Once we were eighteen, no one could stop us.

  I was counting down. Watching weeks fall away. This time next year, our exams would be behind us, and we’d be out of here for good. A year was a long time, but to me, it was tantalizingly within reach. It was going to happen, Charley kept telling me. It filled my head every waking minute—up until the moment I fell in love.

  It had come out of nowhere, the most unexpectedly delirious feeling. First, it shocked me; then it flowed into the emptiness, soothing the ache deep inside me. Stuart felt the same—I could tell from the way he held my hand, from the first time he kissed me. Everything was falling into place. I’d seen it in other people. Now I’d found the start of my very own. Happiness.

  It was like nothing I’d ever known. I stopped cutting, began to trust more than just Charley. I stopped picturing my family dying, too, as thoughts of Stuart filled my head. How even with scars on my arms, he loved me. He loved the broken person I was inside.

  It made it okay, didn’t it? I believed that, I told Charley. Trusting her with my heart, as I’d slowly learned to trust her with everything.

  “Be careful, Case.” Her eyes were guarded. “Don’t love too much.”

  “I won’t! Have some of my happiness!” I called blithely, not thinking to ask her why she’d said that, as I ran to meet him.

  She didn’t ever ask me if we’d done “it.” Truth was, just the thought left me fighting for air. There were too many memories of Anthony resurfacing, trying to drown me. Stuart had sensed something wasn’t right, and he hadn’t pushed me, but at some point, I knew I had to get over it.

  I liked the feel of his skin on mine, liked being wanted by someone who said he loved me. But I couldn’t look. Not that first time. The specter of Anthony’s ugly, leering face hung over me, ruining it. More than ever I wanted to escape him, but even now, it was impossible.

  It was the ultimate injustice. Here, Casey . . . This is what love feels like. Feel how it softly wraps itself around you, how safe it makes you feel.... But don’t get too used to it. It won’t last. But then, nothing does.

  Just when I’d started to believe I was like other people, I was reminded that I wasn’t. Love was for everyone else, not me. I tried to talk to Charley, but I sensed a change. Stuart avoided my eyes, made excuses, stopped telling me he loved my scars, stopped talking to me altogether. And all the time, in the background, Charley was watching my heart break with sharp eyes, waiting for her moment. And when I wasn’t looking, she stole him.

  When your best friend, the only person in the world you trust, commits the ultimate betrayal, you have no one. She took away my breath, my hopes, my dreams. After the pain subsided, I locked my feelings away for good. It was another lesson on not to need people. Another reminder not to trust.

  I tried not to watch her and Stuart together, her remorseless flaunting of how much better than me she was. Reminding me when I’d forgotten that I wasn’t enough.

  Relationships were about using people. I could see that now. My parents knew that, and so did Charley. I’d been stupid to imagine otherwise. They served a purpose for however long, were interchangeable and, ultimately, disposable. Families were no less fickle, as I saw it. Childbirth and the gene pool were no guarantee that you’d be noticed, that people would care.

  Yet Leah’s loss was like acid on the fabric of my family, so that slowly it was falling apart, thread by thread, until the day came when there was nothing holding us together.

  It was the summer when I was seventeen. I was over Charley Harrison and was hanging out with Xander Pascoe again, against my mother’s weakly verbalized protests. Everyone knew that Xander and his friends got their kicks out of shoplifting and smoking weed. “You can’t, mustn’t . . . ,” “Don’t you dare,” “You’re better than them. . . .” She deluded herself with the latter, because I knew she didn’t really think so. And she was right; I wasn’t.

  Xander didn’t care about anyone, but he didn’t frighten me. Rules were for fools, he was always telling me, his lips curved in a cynical smile. You had to make your own, he told me. Or, better still, manage without them.

  I was a willing sponge for his philosophy, desperate to make my own rules. To be invincible as he was. I objected loudly and angrily when my parents booked a holiday for the three of us. I was furious. I had my own plans that summer. I didn’t want to spend it with them. What little was left of our family was held together by fraying threads.

  “Just for once, couldn’t yo
u do this?” my mother asked wearily. As I looked at her, I saw my own feelings mirrored back at me, grief still clouding her sad gray eyes, along with the knowledge that my father didn’t love her. It was the only time I felt the smallest shred of solidarity—my father had betrayed her, just as Charley Harrison had betrayed me. It was enough to do what she asked.

  But I instantly regretted it. Worse was to come when I told Xander. I knew from the look of scorn on his face how weak he thought I was. I’d no idea what I’d be missing, he told me, but too bad if I wasn’t going to be around.

  The hotel was low rise, cool, and white painted, just a few steps above the sunbaked sand and a flat turquoise sea. Even in my antagonistic mood, I couldn’t help noticing the colors, the scents of herbs and pine, intensified in the sun’s heat.

  None of it could hide the truth. Under their holiday best, which made my parents look like everyone else, their marriage was rotting. The new clothes and forced smiles didn’t fool anyone. We were three unhappy people bound only by name, keeping up appearances. I knew that more than they did. They shared breakfast and side-by-side chaise longues under thatched umbrellas, while I found a place in the shade. My father ordered iced drinks for all of us, his air of bonhomie forced against a backdrop of stony silence.

  At first, I brazened the horrified stares of other holidaymakers, imagining their hushed, judgmental comments to each other, which made me flaunt the scars on my arms all the more while I watched their shock from behind my sunglasses. I didn’t care what they thought. It was no different here than it was at home.

  It was as the sun set on the third night that I felt resentment set in. I hated the bar, filled with the clinking of glasses and the murmuring of happy people, all of them better at pretending than my parents were, their mood elevating with the number of drinks they consumed. So contrived, it was killing me.

  I fantasized about leaving, taking a taxi to the airport, flying home alone. More than ever, I didn’t want to be here. As I sipped my second glass of wine, I looked around. There wasn’t anyone I wanted to talk to. Charley’s betrayal meant I wasn’t thinking straight. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have come. There was nothing here for me at all.

  Anywhere else, at any other time, it wouldn’t have happened. The man’s name was Alistair. He was like my father, only more so in every sense. Younger, taller, louder. As he and my father sat at the bar together, the same smug, misguided arrogance leached from both of them as they talked over each other, neither interested in anyone but themselves.

  I knew there was a woman with him. I didn’t need to hear her tell my mother to know she was bored with him. They had that much in common, my mother and the woman—both of them were here with men they’d be better off without.

  Once you started looking, sex was everywhere in this place. In the sun’s heat, the lethargic stillness, fueled by the cocktails into a different, listless kind of heat. Occasionally, I’d see a touch or a look that reminded me of Stuart, feel a yearning to have that again, before quashing it. If you wore your heart on your sleeve, it was only a matter of time before someone came along and tore it in half. As I knew already, you could trust no one.

  That evening, the same restlessness was getting to me, too. Avoiding the gaze of a couple of boys my own age, I watched the woman take my mother’s arm and lead her outside.

  I was left alone at the table. It was square, wicker, glass topped, and I swung my feet, then turned away from the bar, wondering how long I could bear to sit there, hearing my father’s loud guffaw at something Alistair had said.

  Yes, I got why the woman was bored. People were so fucking selfish, weren’t they? Left a trail of damage, without so much as a glance behind them. Look at Charley Harrison, who’d destroyed our friendship for the sake of a quick shag with my boyfriend. Look at my parents, practically ignoring their own daughter, instead deep in conversation with strangers they’d never see again, who meant nothing to them. My mother and that woman, no doubt bitching about their partners. My father and Alistair, drinking too much, finding everything suddenly so funny. They were pathetic, all of them.

  I should have seen it as my cue to get out of there. They wouldn’t have missed me. But I didn’t. Instead, hitching my skirt up slightly, I shifted my legs, glanced briefly at Alistair. He’d noticed. I could tell from his eyes, which darted from my father’s face back to me. I crossed my legs, knowing I was giving him an eyeful, tossed my hair over my shoulders. God, he was so predictable.

  By then I really was bored. After getting up, I walked down to the beach, where the sea lapped quietly on the pebble shore, the moon’s reflection sparkling on its glassy surface. It was beautiful—and empty—but I didn’t mind that. People ruined everything.

  People like Alistair. It didn’t take him long to find me.

  “Fancy a walk?”

  I heard him before I saw him. Upon turning round, I met his eyes. “Not really,” I said coolly.

  “I saw you in the bar. You knew exactly what you were doing.” His audacity was breathtaking in the worst possible way.

  “You seem to have forgotten you’re with someone.” I turned away from him and gazed out across the sea.

  He stepped closer. “Is it about money?” he asked presumptuously, his eyes glistening in the moonlight. “How much do you want?”

  As I stared at him, I thought about it. Sex was power. I already knew that from Charley. Boys, men would do anything for it. Nothing could be worse than Anthony. And money bought choices.

  I glanced back toward the terrace. I could dimly make out the figures of my parents, both now with Alistair’s lady friend. They hadn’t even noticed I’d gone.

  “Two hundred.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but I didn’t care one way or the other. I cut him short as I uttered the lie that I knew would close the deal.

  “I’m sixteen. Take it or leave it.”

  * * *

  I didn’t find him attractive, but that wasn’t the point. As he pushed himself inside me, I made myself think of Anthony, then Stuart. Felt the nausea, disgust, shame, this time holding on to them. I could do this. I wasn’t weak. I was strong.

  He didn’t hurt me, and it was over quickly enough. And unlike with Anthony, this was my choice, under my control. I liked how I felt when he paid me, how easy it was when he found me the next night and every night thereafter.

  It was no one else’s business, least of all my father’s, but on the last night, Alistair got plastered and told him. Outraged, my father defended his daughter’s honor and punched him. With some satisfaction, I watched Alistair’s blood spurting from his nose. After all, he was the grownup, who’d preyed on a teenage girl young enough to be his daughter. If Alistair hadn’t asked, it wouldn’t have happened.

  But it was my parents’ fault, too. I hadn’t wanted to come here. My father yelled at me, called me a slut, demanded I give back the money. I handed over enough notes to keep him quiet, which I never saw again. I didn’t tell him about the rest, and I went home five hundred pounds richer.

  I hid the money inside my underwear drawer. No one would find it. I knew no one would care enough even to look.

  * * *

  The day we got home, I saw Xander and we got drunk together. The day after, I heard the rip that set my teeth on edge as my father broke the last strands holding my family together. But I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t even care by that stage, because I got it. We were a random group of people, linked by genes, who didn’t belong together. My mother had been connected to him only because of a decision they’d made when they were younger. One he regretted. He didn’t care about me at all.

  30

  JACK

  October 15 . . .

  Nick Abraham’s mother, Sheila, had turned out to be difficult. No wonder her son had such an attitude. He’d learned from the best. She’d rambled on at length about how she’d welcomed Jen like her own daughter, but Jen had deceived all of them. What she’d done to them all, especially to
Sheila . . .

  Jack had pressed her for information concerning the time that Jen left Nick.

  “I suppose we got off to a bad start. I tried so hard to make it up to her, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I gave up in the end. There’s only so much you can do, isn’t there? I don’t know what she was thinking, but then, she didn’t know how easy she had it. How could she have walked out on my Nick?”

  It was as though she was trying to say the right thing, but her words didn’t ring true. The concern didn’t show on her face. There was a meanness about her, from her small, piercing eyes and thin lips. The mean-spirited and bitter were always unhappy, Jack had observed over the years. Sheila Abraham was no exception.

  “How well did you know Jen, Mrs. Abraham?” Jack tried to keep her focused. But Sheila Abraham clearly saw this as an opportunity to air her dirty washing in public.

  “Well enough to see straight through her,” she snapped. “Oh, she could turn the charm on, but she didn’t fool me. Still, Nicholas sees that now. He’s better off without her.”

  “Did you know Jen was pregnant?” Jack gritted his teeth. He had endless patience, more than most, but this woman was pushing even him.

  “Yes.” She sniffed. “It would have been disastrous. She was too selfish to be a mother. Maybe it was God’s way . . .”

  God’s way? Jack couldn’t believe what she was saying. “And what about her second pregnancy? Did you know about that?” He knew it was unlikely, but Jack couldn’t help himself. He watched with satisfaction as at last the vindictive Sheila Abraham was stunned into silence.

  “I expect she made it up,” she said at last. “Don’t believe everything she tells you. She’s a schemer.”

  Jack sat back, silent. Apart from the fact that he could see where her son’s less-than-charming personality came from, this was a complete waste of time. Sheila Abraham was one of those blinkered women who thought only about themselves.